Fiber cuts, equipment faults and degradations cause a significant number of disruptions and outages. Often, fault recovery times are slow as the network components (e.g., switches and network administrators) communicate to switch around equipment failures. As businesses and consumers become increasingly intolerant of network failures, downtime can be very expensive to carriers due to both lost revenue and tarnished reputations. As a result, carriers continually search for better ways to protect networks against such fiber faults and reduce costs by more efficient use of protection bandwidth.